When the Czech president Václav Klaus stood to eulogize the former Czech president Václav Havel at a requiem mass last December, mourners in Prague’s soaring St. Vitus Cathedral listened with great anticipation. What would one half of the Czech Republic’s founding rivalry have to say about the other?
“A great president, politician, intellectual and artist has left us; a person who will be remembered with gratitude, reverence, and respect,” Klaus said. “Undoubtedly much is leaving with Václav Havel; however, at the same time, and in particular thanks to his consistent attitudes in life, there is much that is not leaving, and it is incumbent upon us not to let it go.”
It was a tribute to the man with whom Klaus had famously clashed for some twenty years. The War of the Václavs was, until Havel’s death, the great personal drama and cliché of Czech politics. They shared a given name—that of the Bohemian Duke Václav (Wenceslaus), a patron saint of the Czech Republic—but nearly everything else about Havel and Klaus seemed antithetical.
Their separate visions for the Czech state in the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution was reflected in their personalities. Havel, the artist and social democrat who felt most comfortable in blue jeans and ratty sweaters, spoke in the language of broad spirituality and social reform. Klaus, a steely-eyed Austrian-school economist who favors smart suits, preferred conversations on interest rates to wide-ranging discussions of good and evil.
Chris Bowlby, a BBCcorrespondent who
